Catherine Maunsell
Kay Maunsell, Programme Chair of the DCU Graduate Diploma in Social, Personal and Health Education/Relationships and Sexuality Education RSE GDip SPHE/RSE together with the Programme Team; Leanne Coll, Audrey Halpin and Jones Irwin, Ashling Bourke, Vivek da Silva, Anne Lodge, Majella McSharry and Darina Scully are honoured to have been nominated by their students for the President's Awards for Engagement 2024.
The GDip SPHE/RSE is a landmark programme of teacher professional development in the area of SPHE and RSE offered through the DCU Institute of Education. It is the first of its kind in an Irish context and the post-primary teachers studying on the programme are fully funded by the Department of Education. Effective teacher professional development in SPHE/RSE as offered through this programme, aims to facilitates teachers’ critical interrogation of their knowledge and understanding of the policies, theoretical foundations and curricula salient to SPHE/RSE and of innovative, collaborative pedagogies and co-productive and creative ways of working with young people. The programme strives to develop participants’ identities as teachers/educators in SPHE/RSE equipping them with the knowledge, dispositions and skills they need to enact this identity, as well as to reflect critically on it and develop it going forward. It also seeks to develop teachers’ capacity for leadership and as agents of change in respect of SPHE/RSE in their schools, initiating, and working collaboratively within, professional learning communities and across the wider educational system.
Conceptually the programme is underpinned by systemic, rights-based, relational approaches focusing on teachers building positive and empowering relationships with their students, their colleagues, and within the familial, community, and societal contexts in which young people are developing. In conjunction with supporting teacher’s reflexive skills and practice to explore their own personal development and how it relates to their teaching of SPHE/RSE in contemporary classrooms. When taken together, such enhancement and upskilling of teachers’ knowledge, personal development and skills in the teaching of SPHE/RSE has the transformative potential to effect lasting positive change for teachers themselves, their schools, young people and their families
